Image to Text

How it works

This tool uses Tesseract, a well established OCR engine compiled to WebAssembly, to read text out of an image. The engine, its worker, and the English language model are all self-hosted on Clean.tools and configured to load only from this origin, so nothing is fetched from a third party at runtime. Recognition happens inside a Web Worker on your device using the image pixels only.

Responsible disclosure: the OCR engine and English language data total about 15 MB and are downloaded from this site the first time you click Extract text, not when the page loads. This is a deliberate tradeoff. It is much heavier than the instant, tiny tools elsewhere on the site, but in exchange your image never leaves your browser. There is no server, no signup, and no tracking. It works on modern desktop and mobile browsers with WebAssembly support.

Want proof? Open your browser's developer tools and watch the network tab while you work: your image never uploads.

Frequently asked questions

Why is there a one-time 15 MB download?

Optical character recognition needs a real recognition engine and a trained language model. To keep everything private and off third-party servers, both are hosted here and sent to your browser the first time you run the tool. Your browser caches them, so later runs in the same session are much faster and no image is ever uploaded.

Is my image uploaded anywhere?

No. The image stays in your browser. Only the OCR engine and language data are downloaded, and that traffic goes one way, from this site to you. The picture you select is read locally by the WebAssembly engine and is never sent out.

Which languages and image types are supported?

This tool recognizes English text and accepts common image formats such as PNG, JPEG, WebP, and GIF. Clear, high contrast, upright text works best. Photos of dense documents, skewed angles, or low resolution screenshots may return partial or imperfect results.

Why is recognition slower than the other tools?

OCR is genuinely heavy computation. The engine analyzes the whole image to locate and classify each character, which takes real processing time and memory, especially on large images or phones. A progress indicator shows the loading and recognition stages while it works.

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